Radiology imaging software by Light IT Global to address radiologists’ shortage

Radiology staff faces numerous problems that negatively impact not only the efficiency of their work but the overall quality of care as well. Some examples include a complex web of separate workflows, a lack of automatization, and the need to switch between viewing environments.

At the same time, a modern healthcare technology market doesn’t offer many software options that would be targeted specifically towards radiology specialists. That is exactly the problem our client was willing to resolve with unique radiology imaging software.

Their goal was to create a set of digital tools that could take care of different aspects of radiology workflow (receive, transmit, organize, review, and analyze MRI images and DICOM files), quickly process large volumes of data and guarantee maximum stability. The products should also work independently and complement each other, forming an agile system.

Bringing such an ambitious idea to life is challenging from the technical perspective and requires involving an experienced crew that has mastered innovative technology and has experience developing compliant healthcare software. Otherwise, the radiology imaging software either wouldn’t be able to withstand competition or would fail to meet strict security requirements typical for the healthcare industry.

As all of the digital products our client was willing to create were intended for internal use only, the major focus during the implementation process was on the back-end and ensuring the system’s security and fail-safeness. For this reason we’ve chosen Python as a primary back-end technology. It is flexible and versatile enough to ensure smooth data processing regardless of the volume and interoperability necessary for healthcare software.

One of the main goals of the solutions’ development was to streamline the radiology staff workflow and provide them with a way to transmit and process large volumes of data (studies) in a matter of seconds. To achieve that, we’ve incorporated asynchronous logic. It allows an application to perform tasks in a non-blocking manner, therefore, improving its performance.

To safeguard the best way to define the data requirements of an application and reduce the number of requests made to the server, Light IT Global’s experts used GraphQL to fetch all the data that is needed by the application. At the same time, the combination of GraphQL and Apollo Client provides a necessary scalability boost to the application.

While one of the solutions developed by Light IT Global was about to be used by radiology staff and doctors during their work with MRI images, the other product was supposed to serve as a mediator between different hardware or the hardware and the storage.

The introduction of bidirectional automation helped to minimise the need for human interaction as the DICOM files are transmitted, processed, and stored according to more than 100 pre-written rules. The software works with various cloud storage types (simple buckets and specialized ones, such as Google Healthcare). Both desktop and server installations are available.

Once the work on the project has been finished, our client received not one but multiple products.

Solution #1 helps radiology staff to manage medical data processing (MRI image studies) more effectively and streamlines the workflow of medical personnel.

Solution #2 is an application for exchanging and processing medical devices’ data (MRI machines) that works as a background tool automating DICOM file management.

Both of the systems were fully developed and market-ready. Direct Radiology software was successfully incorporated into the radiology department in one of the clinics in Israel. There it proved to be able to handle Big Data requests processing thousands of studies daily (>1M entries successfully processed).

Our client has managed to enter the market with a set of MRI image processing solutions that helps to increase the operational efficiency of any unit working with this type of data.

The software developed by Light IT Global enhanced processes at the level of a network of clinics due to the reduced manual routine work of radiologists. It enables fast loading, processing and transferring of MRI images saving time for healthcare professionals.

Seeking to address the increasing shortage of radiologists, Amsterdam-based Philips has acquired teleradiology platform vendor Direct Radiology. The scaled-up telehealth services are built on a cloud-based radiology informatics portfolio.